Hand Me Down World (9 page)

I arrived towards the end of August. A colleague of JB picked me up from the airport and drove me to the apartment in Friedrichshain. Soon the lovely old buildings lay behind us—we were on Karl Marx Allee—and I found myself pining for the wild-gardens project and what a mistake it had been to come here, that when I get back to London I really must sit my aunt down for a chat and gently ask her to stop feeling she has to do these things for me, when we turned into a quiet tree-lined cobbled street and everything was perfect again.

Midway through September it turned autumnal, earlier than in London. October was cold. Until early November, every morning I rode a bike up Karl Marx Allee to Alexanderplatz. In the bike lane I crouched over the bars. I must have given the impression of someone late for work. The Roma who set my daily schedule usually arrived at the platz around 10am and always left before dark.

I never tried to approach them or draw them into conversation. To befriend them—even to imagine I could seems absurd to me now. Observing these tenacious little women over winter hardened me. So that when I saw that black woman I just saw another vagrant that I didn't need to know about. The Roma do that to you. They harden you. They are as sticky as flies. And once they think they have your interest then you are dead meat. So when I made eye contact with the black woman I was quick to look away again. With the Roma, once eye contact is achieved their faces light up, and off they go with small accelerating steps in their thick socks and beach sandals. They are always so pleased to see you.

They moved like crows. Eye and foot movement not always perfectly aligned, as if they didn't want to pass up any opportunity. I came to think of myself and anyone else as a breadcrumb. The way the crows accelerated towards new crumbs spilling out of the station exits. Some people hated to be singled out. It was as though a part of themselves they wished to remain a secret was suddenly exposed. They resented the publicness of it. These ones would switch to a passing lane, first the thought, then their eyes, their legs and bodies follow. Some go by on stilts, their heads in low-hanging cloud. They do not want to know about beggars, not this one, nor beggars in general. I remember a young blonde woman got past a Roma by looking up at the treetops. She had just seen a blue-tailed cockatiel or perhaps a giraffe. Having chosen that fiction she is obliged to stay with it. Before long the high ridge of her cheeks were coloured with shame. It is awful to feel uncharitable. Awful. One woman on tall legs, the tallest legs I have ever seen, raised her chin and set her gaze off somewhere in the direction of Denmark leaving the tiny Roma woman in her hooped skirt in a shadow from the last ice age.

The punks? The beggars never went near them. They huddled cold and drunk or on their way to getting drunk, their faces like mouldy old bread. The black woman? They didn't go near her either. I know, because the next day she is back where I first saw her, on the same bench, and the Roma are moving tidally either side of her, on their way to richer pickings around the station.

After six months I was sick of Berlin. Sick of the reason for being there. Sick of being a crumb. And it wants to rain for the eleventh day in a row. If only it would stop. If only these shitty people would stop shitting up the day. I am sorry, but these are my impressions too.

By now the Roma were used to me. I always knew I had been clocked, a trace of irritability, something like that, tugging down the corners of their mouths. What was I doing there? And, as it must have seemed to them, always turning away from them and at the same time looking—as I had with the black woman. My ideal of invisibility demanded it. One moment I cannot find any of them, not a single Roma, and in the next the women appear from all directions as if spun out of air—thick ropes of black hair, darting white eyes, brown oval faces. It required swiftness on my part, a deft turn, a startled look of annoyance leading to an abrupt stop, as if I have left something behind and must now run to fetch it. So I'd circle around the station and come back to find them in a corner of the platz, their heads pressed together to form a tight gossipy circle. At dusk the crows flew up to the roof of the Berliner Dom and the tiny women in beach sandals disappeared beneath the damp trees. Sometimes I followed, but only as far as the casino, and that's where I saw the black woman.

We recognised each other, and this time she got up and moved away. I thought no more of her that day. But the next day I did. I found myself looking for her, the way I was used to looking for the pamphleteer, the newspaper vendor, the blind accordion player. Anyway what I meant to say is—she joined that loose constituency that hung out around the station. And, in that way, I found myself looking out for her, noting her whereabouts. She preferred the back eddies, the small park beneath the casino where a person can sit without purpose.

She was different from the Roma. She wasn't seeking anything from anyone. Although that's not to say she wouldn't have if she knew how. At a glance you could see she was homeless, hungry too, I imagine. But because she did not carry a sign declaring ‘I am hungry' I thought it would be rude and presumptuous of me to offer her anything. That's another funny thing. The very thing the Roma suppressed in me—good will, charity, Christian action, call it what you will—came unstuck with her.

This was around the time of the weather changing. An ice-cream vendor appeared. You suddenly heard the Roma kids laughing—all winter they had got about tucked under their mother's arms like miniature bedrolls. More people filled the platz. More Roma too. New faces. Younger stickier ones. There were other inexplicable events. I arrived outside Galeria Kaufhof one morning to find a long open boat resting on a crest of sand. There was no explanation for it. Its gunwale was buttressed with thick rope. The boards were stopped with black tar. More decoratively, a lifebuoy and an anchor chain lay in the sand. The African woman happened to be standing by the rope. She was staring at the boat. When she saw me she looked like someone caught straying into a forbidden area. She quickly moved away. I called out to her to wait. But she didn't look back.

The dog days piled up. At 8am the streets smelt of warm leftovers. In my neighbourhood I was used to seeing a street person employed to put out the cafe tables and chairs, a man of about sixty. His filthy shirt hung on the back of a chair to dry while he set about his work. His upper body was covered with thick dark animal hair. I had come to admire his professional pride, the way he counted with one finger the number of chairs at each table, that childish method of counting, and the unshaven face. The same dignity did not extend to the drunks whom I passed each morning lying in alcoholic dishevelment over the grass, burnt and trampled down to dirt, on Warschauer Bridge. Their trousers were loosened to halfway down their sunburnt arses. Their red faces appeared to exhort the terrors of alcoholism and the blessings of sleep in equal measure as the full blast of the sun rose over the city. I had stopped cycling—an old hockey knee injury had flared up—so it was the train for me. The heat in the carriages was cruel. People fought with windows that had been jammed or stupidly locked. They stared past one another, stared out the window, watched it all slide by—the hormonal plant growth, weeds that were huge and pointless spreading across wastelands of rubbish and parched land to the edge of the Platen housing whose windows had grown opaque with their own special brand of GDR-inspired unloveliness. At Alexanderplatz I passed out of the heavy air of the carriage into the pizza-oven heat.

When did that attack on the Roma in Naples occur? June, I remember now. I cut my hair. Well, over that same period, in Berlin, the Roma disappeared. The platz seemed emptier. With all that space the African woman was more noticeable. Each time our eyes met across the platz she moved away. One night, wanting to find out more about the attacks in Naples, I went online and came across an article about a Romanian governor who for sport used to make the Roma climb trees so he could shoot the ‘crows'. An awful bilious feeling of shame rose in me. I went through my notebooks. On nearly every page I found a reference to the voracious behaviour of crows, their thick black hair and quick black eyes. I felt very uneasy about these notes of mine. Should I put a line through every instance of the word ‘crow', thereby severing the link between my impressionistic language and the Romanian governor's behaviour? On the other hand, would the filmmaker, that anonymous genius, land gleefully on the notion of ‘crow'? He might even be grateful—shame on me for thinking as much, but if I am to be honest I had better own up to the thought that the notion of ‘crow' might provide me with a leg-up. I didn't know what to do. Or I did, but couldn't quite embrace it.

The next time I show up to the platz I'm without my notebooks. This time I am determined to go and speak to the Roma. If they want money for that privilege that's no problem. But there are no Roma, none at all—just the African woman, and this time I approach her without a second thought.

She looked up as she always did with that slightly fearful roll of her eyes. I sat beside her on the bench. I told her my name. Since she didn't say anything in reply, kindly and calmly I asked her if she spoke English. She nodded. I asked her if she was hungry. She nodded. I asked her if she had a place to stay. This time she averted her eyes. Up close I was surprised to see that she was just a few years younger than myself. Until then she was black, African, other. But now I saw a young woman who looked about the same age as my sister Alison. I could have been looking at Ali, apart from the obvious differences. Now I knew what I must do.

I took her off to one of the cafes. She only wanted orange juice. You have to respect that, I mean under the circumstances, I imagine she was ravenous, but all she chose was a plastic bottle of juice. It gave me the confidence to invite her back to stay with me until she got herself sorted. We caught the S-Bahn across town. At Warschauer we walked past the drunks, by now up and baying at demons. She walked beside me, clutching her plastic bag. We must have gone half an hour before she spoke. It was a sweet voice, surprisingly good English. She said, ‘My name is Ines.' Just as quickly the well of words dried up.

Hers was a different kind of presence. She wasn't someone who constantly demands your attention. She didn't talk. She was inwardly focused. All her attention went into not occupying space. I don't know if that makes sense. Let's see if I can explain. At the apartment I had to invite her to sit down. When she did, it was not like someone properly occupying a chair. I'd never thought what ‘properly occupying a chair' might involve until then. She sat as if the chair might collapse under her. And so, out of courtesy, as it seemed to me, she mimicked the idea of someone sitting, but it was her knees and thighs and stomach muscles that really supported her. She sat watching me. She was absolutely still, except for her eyes. Soon I was overly conscious of my own movement about the apartment. I felt she was noting every drawer that I opened, every door that closed, each time the tap ran. While she sat—waiting, not quite sitting but hovering over the chair, that plastic bag perched on her knees—I tried to pretend she wasn't there, but it was hopeless. All the air of the apartment was sucked into that room where she sat, as invited, waiting perhaps for invitations to stand, to walk to the window, to look out at the day, to use the bathroom. I remember looking after Ali's baby girl. Whenever I left her alone in a room I couldn't stop thinking if she was all right. That's how it was with Ines. I had to hurry back to make sure she hadn't stopped breathing.

The couch is a fold-out. She slept there for the next six nights. I lay awake for the whole duration. It was the weight of silence coming from the front room. Sometimes I heard a floorboard creak. Then I'd sit up with the duvet wrapped around me and listen. But there was nothing. Just the long willowy silence and my pounding heart.

In the morning I would find her already dressed in the front room holding her plastic bag. The sheets and blankets had been folded. The bed restored to a couch. In the bathroom the towel was wet. I hadn't heard her get up or run the shower. So I must have slept. She stood very still, watching me. She is the gazelle. I am the lion. Her eyes move when I do. I am aware of her eyes following me out of the room. I can hear her listening for my whereabouts. Now I find myself tiptoeing about the apartment.

I tried to get her to talk—but it was hopeless. She would simply trot out what was already self-evident. She had no place to stay. She did not know anyone. So why had she come to Berlin? No one comes to Berlin by accident. Her eyes shifted from mine. She clutched her plastic bag all the harder. She seemed to think that if she just waited the question would go away, like all the other times. This time I said to her, ‘Ines, what are you afraid of?' She shook her head, then she turned to look over her shoulder towards the sound of the traffic rising against the window panes. I thought she might sob—but there was no breach of her defences. No sudden outpouring. We remained two strangers, one of us looking over her shoulder to escape the other.

I didn't know what to do with her. I rang London. John Buxton couldn't believe what I had done. ‘Are you mad?' he asked. She might have AIDS. She might be scarred from some shitty war that we have never read about. Get her out of there while you can still breathe. I rang Julia. As usual my aunt was full of practical suggestions. So the next morning when I led Ines out of my apartment for the last time I felt shamefully elated. From Alexanderplatz we followed the S-Bahn line up past Hackescher and Friedrichstrasse all the way up to Tiergarten to the African Refugee Centre. With every step taken my heart grew lighter. Soon I would be rid of her. I would be free of my responsibility.

Once in Brighton a few months later I saw a young black woman sitting by herself on a bench above the shingle and I thought of her. Another time it was the newsreader on the telly, what's her name, it was the way she moved her mouth, something about the way she moved her mouth, yes, strange because of course Ines rarely spoke.